So, Ratzinger has been elected the new Pope. Which prophecy is it that says the next pope will be Peter II the Last?
Archive for April, 2005
Penultimate Papacy?
Tuesday, April 19th, 2005Citizen Journalism discussion tonight
Thursday, April 14th, 2005We’re broadcasting (tech stuff willing) at:
http://rura.org:8000/stream.m3u beginning around 7 pm EST.
A few of us will be hanging out on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), too:
irc.freenode.net/berkmanbloggroup.
Someone will probably take live notes at a URL to be determined, but
on the Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog.
Check out our agenda:
Urban Polygraph
Tuesday, April 12th, 2005In the silliest iteration of Urban Challenge yet, the challenge which compensated for its humdrum clues with the physical limitation of running about the city and the personal limitation of no more than 2 team-members (runners) per team, is now adding an online version of their challenge which involves no movement at all; and tries to compensate instead with the lure of the lotto.
“Win a 1 in 11 chance at $1,000,000!” they proclaim. As long as you’re willing to sit through a polygraph test to verify you didn’t cheat. And then come down to New York to endure one of the online-plus-physical challenges, broadcast on television. I don’t know… even Survivor was more appealing to me, somehow. But if it gets civilization even more in the mood of rewarding under-pressure problem-solving rather than simply sports, I can’t be entirely against it.
Wikipedia Deathwatch: Andrea Dworkin (practice makes perfect)
Tuesday, April 12th, 2005”Imagine an encyclopedia that had someone’s death noted in their biography before the first major news outlet had even published an obituary.” —Joe Gratz on Dworkin and WP
Andrea Dworkin, a famous radical feminist known (among other things) for her strident opposition to pornography, died Saturday, April 9, at her home in DC. Just before 2100 UTC of the same day, her Wikipedia bio was updated accordingly. The editor who made the update was a new account, created only to modify her bio and update the list of deaths for April 9. The next day, the death information was removed on two separate occasions for 4 hours each time, while editors debated the reliability of the source on the article’s talk page, and looked for better sources. By 1700 UTC, April 10, the active editors of the page had decided that they had sufficient verification to leave mention of her death in the article.
Just before 1800 UTC, April 11 (45 or 31 hours later, depending on how you count), the UK’s Guardian put out the first obituary notice published in the major news media, and was kind enough to mention in a full-length article that while doing their research, they had found Wikipedia to be the only published source.
In case you haven’t been following along at home, recent deathwatch items (offset from mainstream media announcements): Schiavo (simultaneous), JPII (ditto), Cochran (+20 minutes), Dworkin (+31 hours).
Things you never knew existed
Tuesday, April 12th, 2005…, Inc. A few sample items.
A game of Roulette:
“Feel the fear! Fear isn’t the only thing you’ll feel when you play this exciting game of chance…. Not recommended for small children, cowards, the extremely unlucky, or persons with a medical condition.”
Hilarious gag that will have them laughing (and hopefully quitting smoking) instead of coughing! …4″ square.
Removable body tattoos:
Now you can get inked by night and keep your day job…
I won’t go into the farting pens, monkeys, and aerosol cans that litter the site; these are things I was glad I didn’t know existed.
Googlewhacking
Saturday, April 9th, 2005I’d like to indulge in a little googlewhackamole, to clear the old noggin.
The Grimmelbeast and TheWalfish, trapped in the city whose inherent power spawned the Great Beantown Molasses Disaster, have both been on my mind today during this best of all possible hours; and not because of the godseyeball business, either.
now: the longest night
Saturday, April 9th, 2005You’d think that just getting through long weeks was the hard part. But then there’s the introspection. I’m planning to be up all night bringing you all news from today’s Signal or Noise conference at HLS, transcripts from sessions of the same, translations of your own personal whuffie stacks, and new Current Events. I hope you appreciate this.
Brittanica buys Yahoo!glepaedia, to compete with Wikicarta
Friday, April 8th, 2005The week in wiki, retold via the Wiki Muse… I mean, Wikinews.
While Wikipedia was still recovering from an attempted April 1 buyout by Britannica:
- the German Wikipedia DVD was released, announced, and hit #1(now back to #2) on Amazon’s software bestseller list,
- Yahoo! declared its plans to mirror WP content on a massive Korean server farm and started linking French searches to WP articles, and
- Encarta just today touted the rollout of a pseudo-wiki encyclopedia editing system, reminiscent of the successful Nupedia process. Ahh yes, and they would love to pay you for your editing time. They also have a contractual obligation never to mention the word “Wiki-” in public 🙂
Unfortunately, while Encarta is opening itself to wiki-style editing from the masses, and wants to make its mark as a reliable source of content, it doesn’t even list the names of its editors, not to mention email addresses or ways to get in touch with them. Having a blog hidden away on an MSN Space where a few users can contact one or two of the online editors just isn’t the same. Now if they were to really grasp what openness means, I could get excited about it…
Google takes years to implement simple ad filters
Friday, April 8th, 2005I hope I didn’t startle you, or make you think that they were remedying this situation in the near future. I mention this only brecause Dan Kohn explained recently another of the reasons why this is a problem. The more frequent problem is that you don’t want ads highlighting competition for your own content, even if every one of your readers is loyal.
And ads shouldn’t be boring; I’ve diligently recorded Every. Single. Ad. that I have seen appear on my site that was vaguely interesting (and not “award winning RSS reader and more!”), and it amounts to 4 different ads, 2 from the same source. Ads for RSS readers might be interesting to people who have just heard of RSS last week… they’re not interesting to my readers because my site skeleton mentions RSS a lot.
I could vastly improve the G-automatcher in providing ads my audience cares about, with just a few hints. And the real point is that: not to think of ads as a “necessary evil” that gets slapped on by some clumsy, soulless third party, but as a “potential enhancement” that provides useful information to readers, through the limited frame of what advertisers make available. artwork out of garbage… productive artwork, even.
Yahoo! is suavely first to the punch.
Thursday, April 7th, 2005Most of you know this by now; I’ve been too busy to update my blog much recently or you might have heard it here first. 😉 Yahoo! Search is providing support for Wikipedia.
Wikimedia content will be feature more prominently in Yahoo searches, beginning in French, and be mirrored via Yahoo’s massive Korean datacenter. Once redundant clusters of this sort are set up around the world, there is some question of how to use the resulting off-peak spare cycles… ideas?